Rwanda: Families born of rape

Sue Montgomery, The Gazette12.17.2014

Chantal Mukeshimana, 46, was raped during Rwanda's genocide and gave birth to a child as a result. Her husband was murdered, along with her three children in the 1994 slaughter. She still struggles with her own trauma, as well as that of the girl born from rape.

Vestine Mukangamije (left) was raped by the man who killed her husband and five children during Rwanda's genocide. Poor, homeless and still traumatized by the horrors of 1994, she leans on other rape survivors, such as Chantal Mukeshimana. (right)

Egidie, far right, stands with daughter Diana and son Bertrand. Diana was five during Rwanda’s genocide and was raped in a building next to where her mother was being raped. Egidie and Diana were separated for months and when they finally were reunited, Egidie was pregnant with Bertrand — whose father was one of the many men who raped his mother. The family is healing from their trauma through therapy. Photo and story by Sue Montgomery

Angelique Uwasa, 18, (centre) was born to Chantal Mukeshimana, who was raped during Rwanda's genocide in 1994. Both traumatized, they are trying to heal their troubled relationship which is rife with resentment.Sue Montgomery
/ The Gazette

She has stopped mid-sentence — at the part of her history where she was stripped naked from the waist down and savagely gang-raped for the umpteenth time during Rwanda’s genocide. She begins to gag, her body convulsing.

Her 19-year-old daughter, a product of one of those attacks, sits silently beside her, unmoved. Angélique doesn’t so much as lay a comforting hand on her mother’s knee or wrap her arm around her trembling shoulders. Her disgust is palpable.

“I’ve always felt rejected by her and the rest of the family,” Angélique says, her arms folded across her thin stomach. “And now she feels responsible for the problems I’m having, and I feel guilty about that.”

It is December 2013, and the mother and daughter have just attended a meeting of Best Hope Rwanda, an upstart local NGO headed by 28-year old Dieudonné Ganza, a survivor of the genocide himself who saw in these and other desperate souls an urgent need for psychological healing.

At the gathering, Angélique and her mother sat with dozens of other women raped during the 1994 genocide and the offspring of those atrocities in a cavernous brick building, hunched over on white plastic garden chairs drawn in a semicircle. A single fluorescent light on the wall illuminated their faces. In the room was Richard Kananga, of the National Unity and Reconciliation Commission, whom Ganza specially invited to hear the heartbreaking stories and to finally, 20 years after the fact, urge the government to act.

According to Amnesty International, between 250,000 and 500,000 women were serially and viciously raped throughout the 100 days of frenzied killing in 1994 during which the extremist majority Hutu tried to rid the country of minority Tutsi and any moderate Hutu who didn’t join in. The United Nations has pegged that figure at between 100,000 and 250,000.

The crimes produced at least 20,000 children who found themselves branded with shame and shunned by both ethnic groups — by the Hutu for being born of Tutsi mothers and by the Tutsi for having “genocidaire” fathers. Worse, their mothers rejected them for the daily reminder of the horror they experienced during conception. Many referred to their children as “fruit of the devil.”

“I was vomiting and when I realized I was pregnant, I wanted to kill myself,” Chantal said in a quiet, monotonous voice. “But my mother-in-law said, ‘Don’t worry, the child will die because it’s from the enemy.’

“When I gave birth, I didn’t want to breastfeed her,” she continued, as Angélique sat, unmoved, beside her. “I wanted to just give her water so she would die, but other women convinced me …”

Angélique grew up with an emotionally wrecked and distant mother, and sensed the rejection. Whenever she broached the topic, her mother refused to discuss it. Finally, when she was 8, Angélique learned the truth.

“I cried every night after that, then stopped talking for a week,” she said, fiddling with the beaded bracelets on her left wrist. Her dark eyes filled with tears and she continued, her voice quiet.

“She’s the only parent I have and when I’m sad, she tries to comfort me.

“But she can’t give 100 per cent because of what she’s been through.”

Besides raising Angélique and her two children who survived the genocide, Chantal also supports her brother, who was paralyzed in 1994 when his spinal cord was slashed with a machete. Her rapists killed her parents, siblings, husband and three children.

Chantal’s fractured family feels overlooked by the government and Kananga, from the Unity and Reconciliation Commission, admits some have fallen through the cracks.

“When we offered support to widows and children we thought we were supporting everyone,” Kananga said in an interview following the Best Hope Rwanda meeting.

Like a true government bureaucrat, he calls on Ganza to gather statistics so a strategy can be developed and workshop organized — jargon that frustrates mental health workers in this country. The numbers are already known, they say, and 20 years on, help is long overdue. With just six psychiatrists and one or two mental health nurses or psychologists in each district hospital, huge pockets of people are overlooked.

“We need to find real and comprehensive ways to deal with our community wounds because these problems are complex yet interventions are sometimes superficial,” said Aimeé Utuza, a psychologist and genocide survivor who is completing a master’s degree in public health and runs her own NGO called Living with Happiness. “The priority is mostly on studies, consulting and institutional organization.

“We need more hands-on help in the communities.”

Immediately after the genocide there were other priorities. Electrical, water and phone lines all had to be replaced, as did homes and offices. People had to be fed and housed.

The government’s mental health policy points out that one of its major challenges these days is how best to care for women who were raped and the children born of rape — as if it’s a recent phenomenon. Orphans, especially the ones who found themselves as heads of households post-genocide, are also in need of care, the policy says.

Complicating the issue is the fact so many children of rape aren’t even aware of their origins. Their mothers, too ashamed and traumatized to speak of the past, often lied and said the fathers had either died or fled the country.

One survivors’ NGO that was initially set up to help children of rape fund their education (they weren’t considered by the government as victims of the genocide, so didn’t qualify for survivors’ education funds, known as FARG) has now focused its efforts on psychological support.

“There’s a huge need,” explained Albert Gasake, a young lawyer who advocates for survivors’ legal rights. “We think that now that the kids are turning 20 they have a right to know their past.”

Gasake works for SURF, a survivors’ organization founded by a British citizen of Rwandan origin. SURF supports 819 Rwandan women who gave birth due to rape. Among those, only 50 have revealed the truth to the children.

It’s a difficult revelation to absorb, he said, and some reactions have been disturbing.

“One young man refused to speak Kinyarwanda and said he was Ugandan, while another woman became a prostitute,” Gasake said. “Some have become violent.”

Outside the southern town of Butare, in a village called Huye, a woman named Egidie, who didn’t want her last name used in order to protect her children, pauses while recounting her harrowing story and looks up at the cement ceiling in her modest home. Her calloused hands resting in her lap slowly count her fingers and she stops when she reaches eight.

That’s how many men repeatedly raped her during the genocide.

But she doesn’t dare allow herself to think about how many raped her daughter, Diane, who was just 5 years old and imprisoned in an adjacent building.

“The third time I heard them raping her, it was during the night, and I told myself, ‘This is death, I don’t want to see my daughter dying, I have to go die somewhere else.’”

When mother and daughter were finally reunited months later, both were emaciated and Diane could barely walk, she was so internally wounded. Egidie then discovered she was pregnant, carrying a child from one of her rapists.

“I wanted to abort,” Egidie said calmly about her son Bertrand, who just turned 19. “At first I refused to breastfeed him and was looking away when the doctors gave him to me.

“I didn’t want to look him in the face, knowing where he came from.”

In order to survive, she banded together with a handful of other women who also had been raped, calling themselves Abasa, which means “those who look alike” in Kinyarwanda.

A group of about 45 tortured and destitute souls, they occupy a neat row of houses looking over Rwanda’s green terraced slopes, that were built with donor money for widows of the genocide. Because men were the prime targets of the killers in 1994, hundreds of thousands of women had no one else to depend on but one another.

They’ve helped raise each other’s children, shared what meagre belongings they had, cried together over the unspeakable cruelty they endured and watched some of their members waste away and die from AIDS.

Bea Gallimore, a Rwandan American who started an NGO in 2005 to help traumatized women and their children, discovered the women of Abasa a full 12 years after the genocide.

“They were living in the most despicable conditions,” she said, adding that they didn’t have money for food or school uniforms, let alone anyone to deal with their trauma.

“We decided we couldn’t start counselling until we addressed those issues.”

Gallimore’s NGO, called Step Up, helped train a few of the women in bee keeping and provided material for sewing so the group could get some income from selling honey and clothing.

Step Up then helped train therapists at Kigali Health Institute and Rwanda University in Butare and is now renovating a building for a counselling centre. The compassionate ear they have given Egidie and her family has clearly helped them overcome at least some of their trauma; unlike Chantal and her daughter Angélique, they seem almost at peace.

In an interview in their small, neatly kept home with breathtaking views of Rwanda’s undulating lush hills, Egidie, Diane and Bertrand sit in a row on their wooden couch. Bertrand, a 6-foot-tall gangly teen who loves basketball, hip-hop and posting selfies on Facebook, nervously straightens and smooths the lace tablecloth on the coffee table in front of him.

“In the past I felt rejected and unwanted, but my mother hadn’t explained to me what happened,” he said. “Now I’m trying to move on, help my mom and leave the past.”

Diane, interrupted throughout an interview by texts and calls on her phone, is in her third year of development studies at university. Her mom said that after the genocide, Diane would often hide under the table and make odd sounds. Today, she hates men.

Diane declines to talk about the past, except about her murdered father. Not about the way he was butchered for being a Tutsi, but about how she remembers him.

“My father loved us, especially me,” she smiles, remembering her extended family of step-siblings, all but one of whom were murdered. She’s dressed in a green, orange, white and turquoise flowered dress with a black suit jacket over it, its sleeves rolled up one turn. Her matching earrings and necklace, made by a local women’s organization out of scraps of green and yellow material, set off her smooth, dark skin. Her hair is pulled back in tresses, making her huge round eyes look even larger.

“When we ate together, he’d bring me bread and sweets, lots of things,” she said, breaking into laughter, revealing perfectly straight, white teeth. “He took me to visit places. We were rich because we even had a car.

“At some point right after the genocide there was one single photo of my father, but it was lost,” she said. “We were very young and didn’t care much about it but I would love to have it now.”

But the children born of rape don’t even have those fond memories to cling to. They are very much alone, confused by mixed messages received from the only parent they know, and feel rejected by their communities and government.

Ganza, who is seeking scarce government funds for psychological help for his overlooked group of raped women and their grown children through Best Hope Rwanda, argues that if the trauma isn’t addressed now, it threatens to become a bigger problem in the future. Young adults like Angélique report that their monthly meetings where they can talk about their feelings provide a major relief.

“It doesn’t come easily or automatically, but we are trying,” she said. “Our case has been overlooked by the government but they need to address it.

“We need help now.”

The reporting for this project was made possible by a journalism grant provided by the Canadian Institutes for Health Research.

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